Self-service data preparation

Data preparation is the meat in the sandwich between data sources on the one hand and business intelligence, (predictive) analytics and visualisation on the other. For some time there has been an increasing trend towards self-service business intelligence and analytics, with user departments licensing tools from companies such as Tableau and Qlik so that business analysts can undertake analysis without needing resort to IT. This self-service approach is fine when it is limited to information that is internal to the relevant department. However, it is increasingly the case that users want to analyse multiple sources of data, often of different types and in different formats, which derive from a variety of internal and external sources.

Such data, as we shall discuss, needs “preparation” in order to put it into a form that is suitable for analysis. Historically this has meant relying on IT, which is the antithesis of self-service. What is now emerging as a new market segment are tools that enable data preparation in a self-service manner. These are the subject of this paper. We will discuss what such products offer, why they are important and what sort of features to look for.

Bloor is an independent research and analyst house focused on the idea that Evolution is Essential to business success and ultimately survival. For nearly 30 years we have enabled businesses to understand the potential offered by technology and choose the optimal solutions for their needs.

Latest Tweets

#blog: European Cloud Leader OVH: very different … in a very good way (Part 1) - If you are looking for consistently good, globally scaleable IaaS performance at a low price, OVH is one of the first places you should look. bloorresearch.com/20…

#Research: Infoworks - Infoworks automates all the steps required for Hadoop deployments from ingestion through to the generation of OLAP cubes and/or the creation of data science models. bloorresearch.com/re…

#Research: Magnitude Information Engine - The Magnitude Information Engine is based on what used to be Kalido, which was originally developed by Royal Dutch Shell as a means of speeding up the creation of its data warehouses. bloorresearch.com/re…